Museums

Sometimes, but not all that often, a museum satellite does make sense. Later this week, we’ll see the opening of one that does. Friday is opening day for Philbrook Downtown, an industrial space in the Brady Arts District of Tulsa that the museum is turning into a new arts center.

The Philbrook itself, a villa built in the 1920s on a 23-acre site, makes for a lovely house museum, with spacious rooms and wide corridors. I visited about seven years ago, and was impressed with the overall feel (though I don’t remember any masterpieces). And I loved the grounds and garden.

But it’s true that modern, contemporary art and Native American art probably don’t look their best there. They’ll go into the new building, for which architect Richard Gluckman has taken an early 20th-century industrial warehouse and turned it into an art center of 30,000 sq. ft. Contemporary art and new media will go on the first floor, and Native American art will go upstairs. Near those galleries will go the Eugene B. Adkins Study Center, which “integrates Philbrook’s outstanding artwork, special collections from the  Museum’s H. A. & Mary K. Chapman Library, and Eugene Adkins’s personal archives.” I’m not sure what that means, but we’ll find out.

According to the Tulsa World:

The inaugural exhibits for Philbrook Downtown will be “Opening Abstraction” – abstract paintings and sculpture from 1945 to the present drawn from the permanent collection, on display on the first floor – and “Identity and Inspiration: 20th Century Native American Art,” which presents items from the museum’s extensive holdings of American Indian art in a uniquely thematic way in the main gallery space on the second floor.

Also on display in the smaller galleries will be “Adolph Gottlieb: Sculptor,” showcasing a little-seen facet of the work of this pioneering abstract artist, and “Sirens of the Southwest,” featuring works by influential women artists who lived and worked in this region of the country, including Georgia O’Keeffe.

The addition also gets the Philbrook, which can seem a little remote, into Tulsa’s downtown, which I recall as full of art deco buildings and touches. That is likely to mean a new audience, patrons of the existing Brady Arts District, an old section of Tulsa that claims to be “rich with cultural icons such as the Cain’s Ballroom and the Ole Lady on Brady. The buildings in the area that are still standing are primarily red brick and have been utilized as warehouses.” Over the past 20 years, it has gentrified and attracted new cultural institutions.

So while I think some satellites don’t add much more than costs — and it’s harder to manage two spaces than one — the Philbrook Downtown seems to add a new dimension and to have a real purpose, not just expansion. Let’s see how it all turns out.

Meantime, here’s what NewsOn6 in Tulsa is saying and check out the slide show with the Tulsa World article.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Philbrook

Iowa is again experiencing spring floods, which reminds us that five years have passed since the devastating 2008 deluge. Coincidentally, yesterday, the Iowa Board of Regents voted to give the University of Iowa permission to plan for a new museum to replace the one inundated in 2008.

To recap events: The museum’s collection, which includes Jackson Pollock’s Mural, was moved ahead of the 2008 floods and now resides at the Figge Art Museum in nearby Davenport. But when the university applied for funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild in a new location, away from the floodplain, the request was denied. FEMA said that since the existing — and flooded — museum (at right) wasn’t more than 50 percent damaged, it did not qualify for federal funding for a new building — just renovations. But the university could not get insurance on the collection, valued at some $500 million, in the old location on the Iowa River.

Despite many appeals, which were exhausted last March, the University could not convince FEMA to pay up.

Now, according to the Associated Press,

…The university said it will study a range of potential sites for the museum near its campus in Iowa City and options for funding the building through donations and partnerships with the private sector. While the project is still years from completion, the approval for planning by the Iowa Board of Regents gives hope that the university’s art collection of 12,400 paintings, sculptures and other objects will one day return to campus…

…[University treasurer Douglas]  True said the university plans to pursue a “public-private partnership” for the new building, which could be used to display the collection and for other purposes. He said the university would soon send out “a request for information” to developers who may have ideas on where the building could be located and how it might be financed and operated….

…The university has not set a price tag for the building, and told the regents that the amount of university funding provided for construction and operation will depend “upon the nature of the financial ownership.” In the past, the school has said a new museum could cost $75 million.

The old museum, which now serves a few other functions including those of the music school, was again evacuated this week, threatened by flooding.

 Photo Credit: Courtesy of the AP

Memorial Day was last weekend, of course, but I want to catch up on a release that the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston put out a few days ago: over that miserable three-day weekend, weatherwise, a record number of people visited the museum — in part because it was free and an opportunity to show solidarity in the wake of the Patriot’s Day Boston Marathon bombing.  MFA staged a “Boston I Love” Community Weekend, which — while hardly a celebration — was an opportunity to commune with other Bostonians. It worked.

Says the release:

Of the 29,391 people who attended the event, 9,759 visited on Saturday, 10,373 on Sunday, and 9,259 on Monday.  The Museum, which was open each day from 10 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., welcomed an average of 1,400 people per hour—the most visitors per hour in nearly 50 years.

There were lines to get in — see the picture in the release — and while they were there, visitors contributed about $6,500 to The One Fund Boston.

As RCA readers know, the Metropolitan Museum has lent three paintings in support. Museum-goers joined in, with “several thousand visitors participat[ing] in the collage-making project “Boston I Love,” creating about a thousand pictures that illustrated the spirit of Boston. Works were hung near the glass wall of the Druker Family Pavilion Community Classroom in the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art.”

Another outpouring came from people all over the world in the form of more than 1,700 flags made in tribute to the people of Boston. They were hung in the museum’s courtyard, which when it opened a few years back was criticized by some as being cold and off-putting. Chihuly’s Lime Green Icicle Tower helped, but from afar it seems as if it had never looked better than last weekend:

I love it when an art museum proves its worth as a place people want to go for an uplifting experience.

Photo Credits: Courtesy of the MFA